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Mars has right ingredients for present-day microbial life: study
- monkeydust 6y agoCurious, will the samples collected via mars return mission provide proof beyond doubt on this assertion?
- aardvarkr 6y agoThat’s the hope! Though the rover should have most of the scientific equipment that it needs to run the relevant experiments right there on the surface of Mars.
- zokier 6y agoAs I understand, the samples collected by Perseverance and returned by Mars Sample Return will be taken at surface level. So they will not be able to tell that much about the sub-surface. Also of course that is just one small region that Percy is taking samples from, it can not provide proof about conditions of other regions of the planet.
- NanoWar 6y agoWhat happens when we'd put some microbes there now?
- csunbird 6y agoWe probably have done this already, with the man made machines that we had sent. Although the NASA tries to sterilize the robots/rovers, I doubt that they can kill every bacteria and some of the bacteria are known to somehow survive when exposed to space as well.
- Thiez 6y agoEarth bacteria require liquid water (amongst other things). Thus far none of the rovers have landed in a lake, so it's unlikely that earth bacteria will be spreading any time soon.
- karmakaze 6y agoWhat's more important: knowing if Mars had/has life on it or having life on it?
- levosmetalo 6y agoI’m more concerned what happens when we bring some microbes from Mars.
- paulpauper 6y agothings that go to mars tend to stay there
- ceejayoz 6y agoThat's changing very soon. Perseverance's mission includes collecting and storing samples for a return mission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_sample-return_mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_sample-return_mission
- astroflask 6y agoAnd also things that have gone to Mars in the past have blasted off chunks of Mars into Earth.
- daveguy 6y agoAndromeda Strain makes a good story, but viruses and bacteria tend to evolve with their hosts and environment. It is unlikely that any virus or bacteria brought from mars would have a serious impact on humans or our environment. We probably aren't good hosts to something that's been evolving in martian conditions.
- agumonkey 6y agoInteresting, maybe they plan to never bring anything to Earth's surface .. maybe use ISS as an 'air gap'
- x86ARMsRace 6y agoI've been curious about this recently actually. What are the downsides of "seeding" a plant with life to study how it evolves?
- jakswa 6y agoThe fear I read is that we might be accidentally eradicating any life we don't yet know about, if we introduce life from earth.
- bouncycastle 6y agoDon't we already to this on Earth?
- ben_w 6y agoYes, but it’s not helpful for research.
- ben_w 6y agoMeans it’s hard to tell, if we find life there later, if that life was native or if we put it there.
- anikan_vader 6y agoIt becomes much more difficult to determine whether the planet contains indigenous life once you've introduced life from Earth.
- FridayoLeary 6y agoi think it's safe to assume it doesn't. And a few plants in a tiny section of mars will hardly ruin the evidence anyway.
- CardenB 6y agoWhat makes you think it’s safe to assume that Mars has no life?
- mr_toad 6y agoThey’d die. For some reason the ‘beneath its surface’ part of the headline got left off this submission. The surface of Mars is an anoxic toxic irradiated frozen desert.
- johnchristopher 6y agoMost likely we'd be able to determine they are from earth from their properties and from their locations and from their small numbers ?
- bpodgursky 6y agoI don't understand the excitement for finding life on Mars. I personally really, really hope we do not find life on Mars. If we find even the most basic microbial life, NASA is going to shut down all future exploration in the interest of Martian planetary protection. China and Russia probably won't, but the US will cripple itself (again) out of caution. On a more existential level, finding life elsewhere in the solar system (assuming it's not diaspora from earth or vice versa) says really dark things about our own potential. If life is truly common in the universe, the fact that we haven't seen it anywhere means that the great filter is still in front of us -- and nobody has slipped through. OTOH, if the great filter is behind is, there's no data about our likelihood of killing ourselves before we do manage to explore the rest of the known universe. This is such a better outcome.
- Hammershaft 6y agoAlternatively both instances of life could be linked. https://www.space.com/22577-earth-life-from-mars-theory.html https://www.space.com/22577-earth-life-from-mars-theory.html That said my gut says hypothetically talking about the danger of a universal great filter is silly when we clearly face near term filters of our own design right now (climate change, environmental collapse, a nuclear arms race)
- sthnblllII 6y agoMassive loss of life or economic disruption, while hugely bad, is not what a great filter means in this context. If earth's climate returns to pre-holocene greenhouse gas levels, temperature and sea levels the human race would not be cut off from the stars in a fundamental way.
- mulcahey 6y agodid you read Bostrom's article with the same opinion? https://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf https://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf
- throwawaycuriou 6y ago
- illegalmemory 6y agoWe don't have "full" understanding of human body and working of mind. I suspect in future humans who take birth and grow in different scenarios like earth natural / earth urban / mars urban and so on to have different life spans and body capacities.
- Daniel_sk 6y agoThere are even mysterious (with hypothetical biological origin) geysers on Mars: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geysers_on_Mars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geysers_on_Mars
- OmicronCeti 6y agoTo be perfectly honest they're not that mysterious. In the Martian science community they're called araneiforms, and the biological origin hypothesis is fairly fringe. Lots of good reading in these papers: - "The formation of araneiforms by carbon dioxide venting and vigorous sublimation dynamics under martian atmospheric pressure": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-82763-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-82763-7 - "HiRISE observations of gas sublimation-driven activity in Mars’ southern polar regions: III. Models of processes involving translucent ice": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103509003893 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001910350... - "How martian araneiforms get their shapes: morphological analysis and diffusion-limited aggregation model for polar surface erosion": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103518301143 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001910351...
- f430 6y agois anybody going to talk about the numerous and very obvious artificial structures on Mars and Moon? Just shut up and chalk it up to conspiracy right like a good American.
- ben_w 6y agoThe only obvious examples of either are the ones humans put there — the probes, the rovers, the Apollo Lunar Modules and associated material.
- f430 6y agoso you mean we've figured out how to build large structures outside planet earth without the public knowing?
- OmicronCeti 6y agoPlease link to any of these 'large structures' otherwise we'll just continue to assume this is being pulled from your ass.
- f430 6y agoRather not waste time finding photos which you will just argue is fake or not possible because of your "PhD" accreditation.
- OmicronCeti 6y agoI mean it's on you since you're making the assertion.
- anigbrowl 6y agoShow us your best evidence. I'm not going to waste my time looking for something you may dismiss as being from an invalid source.
- paulpauper 6y agoFor almost half a century, scientists have been speculating about sub-surface life on mars. Why with existing technological progress can we not just get a yes or no answer about this.
- adt2bt 6y agoIf I had to guess: planets are big, rocks are hard, and if there is life, it’s vanishingly rare or hard to find.
- ssijak 6y agoGoogle something like “mars viking life experiments”
- freeflight 6y agoFor a moment there I was thinking: "Wait, Vikings have been to Mars?", turns out NASA had a Viking program that sent two space probes to Mars in the 70s [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_lander_biological_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_lander_biological_exper...
- mrfusion 6y agoI’ll answer your question with a question. Would space exploration get more or less funding if we settled a fundamental question about the existence of life outside earth?
- eggsmediumrare 6y agoProbably more.
- spaetzleesser 6y agoI would think they would get way more money to look at that life.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
- jonplackett 6y agoIt's strange that we have to speculate about if life could have emerged on Mars, without really knowing for sure how it emerged on Earth.
- michaelmrose 6y agoIt's hard to learn something about a class of things while only studying one example of that class.
- gaurav_v 6y agoThere is a very good book on the origins of life on earth by Eric Smith, called "The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth." Here's a YouTube talk with some of the arguments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cwvj0XBKlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cwvj0XBKlE
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 101001001001 6y agoAs soon as the habitation of Mars picks up a little momentum, martians and Mars colonization will be demonized by the media. It will become a political debate that is fueled by the CIA and other entrenched interests. They will paint it as an ethical issue and focus on the immorality of disturbing the native habitat, or something similar to that. Mark my words.
- tittenfick 6y agoTake your pills.
- SECProto 6y agoThe ethical issues with colonizing/developing Mars were already explored pretty deeply in Red/Blue Mars almost 30 years ago, so readers could mark Kim Stanley Robinson's words instead
- 101001001001 6y agoThe substance of the issues will not be of any importance. They will be used as a tool to alter the course of Mars colonization. Just like every other topic of geopolitical importance, it will be distorted by special interests in a hell-storm of irrational dogma. And just as always, people will lap it up and the truth will die a brutal death. The amazing thing is that it hasn’t started yet. People in the government don’t understand what’s going on. But eventually they will catch on.
- zoomablemind 6y agoI know, it may sound absolutely irresponsible, but have the scientists considered practical benefits of sending in some bacterial life from Earth to let it try to colonize the remote destinations ahead of sending in humans for the same purpose? Supposedly, micro-life has better chance to adapt to new environments, as long as the basic resource is available. In case of Mars, humans lack the basic resources - water and oxygen. But could there be some bacterial life on Earth which could make use of the abundant carbon dioxide and could adapt to the harsh conditions? Or such an approach would 'spoil' those worlds for the humans and take the conditions out of control?
- waheoo 6y agoMore irresponsible than letting the human race exhaust and suffocate itself on this planet? At some point we need to realise colonizing another planet is going to be necessary, and it is going to cause lots of damage.
- fnord77 6y agowe'll have exhausted this planet a thousand years before we'd have the technology to make Mars habitable. It just isn't going to happen for numerous reasons. The biggest are the lower gravity and the very weak magnetosphere.
- fny 6y agoWe haven't even successfully made the deserts on Earth habitable yet without trucking in resources from more hospitable places.
- ben_w 6y agoMars’ magnetosphere is something we could fix with known tech if we cared to. Expensive, but we could. Lack of water, low atmosphere, they’re a bit further out of our range. Fixing the lower level of sunlight is way out of our current league.
- deleted 6y ago